Thriller · Drama · Romance
South Korean (아가씨)
2016 · Directed by Park Chan-wook · 145 min
Korea, 1930s, under Japanese rule. A young pickpocket takes a job as handmaiden to a sheltered Japanese heiress on a remote estate, as part of a scheme to defraud her. Lavish, tense and darkly witty, it is a thriller built on deception and desire.
Why it matters in cinema history
A landmark of 2010s Korean cinema and of the modern erotic thriller. It took Hitchcockian suspense and a British novel's structure into a colonial setting, and it treated its central love story with a distinctly female point of view.
Watch with intention
Watch it as a film about storytelling: keep asking whose eyes you are seeing through, and what is being kept from you.
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